Progress
I have at last finished the Magic Mountain. I know it took a while, but it took Thomas Mann about 12 years to write it and Hans Castrop 7 years to live it so my 2 or 3 months ain't so bad. Besides it is all about time.
It is an amazing and extremely thought provoking book (if not a real page turner).
It got me musing on Progress, as an abstract concept or more particularly as a meta-narrative. And you know, I don't belive in it. I have been saying that for years but I find that I actually mean it, even if it is a frightfully PoMo attitude. I don't deny that there is a certain inevitability about change, I think the second law of thermodynamics proves that, and I am something of a determinist. I just deny that there is any progress in the sense of 'progression towards something' or that the present is or the future will necessarily be an improvement.
Put that way it seems utterly self evident, but the ideology of progress, as Herr Settembrini kept pointing out, is pretty central to liberal humanism. And lets face it post modernism has yet to really challenge its hegemony in the West.
Of course, this doesn't mean that I subscribe to any kind of romanticism about the past. I read too much history for that. I think Pushkin summed that up well
in 'The History of the Village of Goryukhino'
" the concept of a golden age is natural to all nations and proves only that people are never satisfied with the present and from experience having little hope in the future, they adorn the irrevocable past with all the colourful fancies of their imagination"